Did you ever wonder how the Global Warming Folly got started? Why did government get all excited and start supporting anything that promised to reduce the dreadful fate that science told us was about to descend on the United States and the world? Here’s how it happened back in June of 1988. James Hansen, perhaps envisioning a Nobel Prize for science, wanted to scare the Congress of the United States into supporting his vision of approaching disaster.

Watch as former Senator Timothy Wirth, (D-CO) speaking on a PBS interview about the June 1988 Senate hearing on global warming, gleefully describes his loss of integrity and respect for his office.

We didn’t know very much about climate. I’m not sure quite what the moves were, but the upshot was that climate scientists borrowed the computer programs that the financial sector had devised to predict the market, because they wanted to predict the future too. So they started with what science knew for sure, which wasn’t very much, and added educated guesses based on what they thought they knew, and finished off with uneducated guesses, because they just didn’t know. But such a warning had to be funded. Congress was scared. Grant money began to flow.

One Michael Mann’s doctoral thesis at the end of the 1990s came up with an elaborate graph that spiked up sharply in the future, further scaring the people who controlled the funding. The UN’s IPCC was happy to get in the game, and anyone who could write a good grant proposal to prove how increasing warming of the earth was going to mess up everything, got their proposals funded. There was no money for those who were skeptical. The idea was that worldwide warming was unusual, and the pre-industrial temperature history had been uneventful, and was the ideal climate condition that we should all strive to maintain.

This required pretty massive ignorance of historical climate and ordinary history and literature that described the climate. Any anomalies were just local phenomena. But the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age as local North Atlantic events? Really? A nutty idea. In the early 1990s, Japanese scientists Hiroyuki Kitagawa and Eiji Matsumoto had published clear data from the year 1995 that showed that temperatures over the previous 2000 years in South Japan fluctuated over a range of 5°C. A clear millennium cycle is depicted. Before Michael Mann.

About ten years later Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (see the book The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford) explained how the hockey stick graph resulted in the same conformation no matter what numbers were entered. Mann has never recanted, to his shame.

An increase in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 would be 1.9 degrees Celsius by 2050. We can adapt to a 1.9° increase in warmth, if it doesn’t continue cooling as it has been doing for the past 17 years.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been had.

President Obama is in denial about both the climate and energy realities. The data shows that global warming isn’t happening. Electric cars aren’t happening, nobody wants them. If the president would just give up his backing for his cronies in the green energy industry who are getting wealthy on government largess with taxpayer’s money, it might do wonders for the budget.